The role of experience and discourse in children’s
developing understanding of pretend play actions
Hannes Rakoczy *, Michael Tomasello and Tricia Striano
Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
The present work investigated the development of an explicit understanding of pretend
play actions. Study 1 revealed a long de´calage between earlier implicit understanding of
pretence as an intentional activity and a later more explicit understanding. Study 2 was a
training study. It tested for two factors – systematic pretence experience and explicit
pretence discourse – that may be important in development from early implicit to later
explicit pretence understanding. Two training groups of 3.5-year-old children received
the same pretence experiences involving systematic contrasts between pretending,
really performing and trying to perform actions. In the ‘explicit’ group, these
experiences were talked about with explicit ‘pretend to’ and ‘pretend that’ language.
In the ‘implicit’ group no such discourse was used, but only implicit discourse in talking
about pretence versus real actions. The two training groups were compared with a
control group that received functional play experience. After training, only the explicit
group showed improvement in their explicit pretence understanding. In none of the
groups was there any transfer to tasks tapping mental state understanding, false belief
(FB) and appearance-reality, (A-R). The findings are discussed in the context of current
theories about the developmental relations between pretence, discourse, and mental
state understanding.

From around 2 years of age, children, when engaged in joint pretending with others,
show a solid understanding of pretend play actions. They are not confused about the
non-literal treatment of objects in pretence, for example, they do not try to eat a ball in
jointly pretending that it is an apple (Leslie, 1988, 1987, 1994). They know that an
object can be assigned different pretence identities in different scenarios (e.g that the
ball can now be an apple and later an orange; Harris & Kavanaugh, 1993). And they can
even draw systematic inferences about stipulated pretence situations and act
accordingly, for example, when a partner pretends to spill some tea on the table,
they pretend to clean it up at the corresponding place (Walker-Andrews & Harris, 1993;

Walker-Andrews & Kahana-Kalman, 1999). These findings prima facie suggest that even
young children have a quite sophisticated grasp of the nature of pretence actions.
However, when explicitly asked whether someone is pretending or what they are
pretending, even much older children struggle. Not until late in their fourth year can
children state what an object really is in contrast to what a person pretends it to be
(Flavell, Flavell, & Green, 1987). Up to 5 years of age, children, in the so-called ‘Moe’
task, wrongly say that someone who behaves like an X, but does not know anything
about Xs, pretends to be an X (Lillard, 1993b). This suggests that they lack a deeper
understanding of pretence as based on knowledge and imagination.
Thus, in the realm of pretence understanding there seems to be a long de´calage
between sophisticated early competence and later emerging abilities to talk about
things explicitly, similar to the de´calage found in other areas of cognitive
development. Unfortunately, however, in the study of pretence so far there have
been no experiments that directly compared children’s performance on different
dependent measures – from looking time via action to language measures – in
structurally similar tasks. In the area of physical cognition, for example, one such
comparative study (though not comparing implicit action with explicit verbal
measures, but dishabituation with action measures) was carried out by Hood, Carey,
and Prasada (2000). Infants from 212 months have been found to be sensitive to
regularities pertaining to gravity, impenetrability of objects and physical support by
looking longer at events violating these regularities in a dishabituation paradigm
(Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992). Yet in the study by Hood et al.,
even 2-year-old children failed to make use of this sensitivity when presented with the
same events in an object search paradigm: they consistently looked for the object in
places where it could not have been according to principles of gravity and
impenetrability. In the area of social cognition, one study directly comparing implicit
with explicit verbal measures was completed by Clements and Perner (1994) who
presented young children with a traditional unexpected transfer (change of location)
false belief (FB) scenario. However, instead of asking the child where the protagonist
would look for the transferred object, more implicit measures (looking to one of the
locations, and preparatory actions supposed to help the character at one of the
locations) were chosen. In these more implicit measures, children revealed sensitivity
to the FB of the protagonist long before they could explicitly state the protagonist’s
FB and take it into account in explaining and predicting his actions.
Following a similar logic, we wanted to compare children’s early implicit pretence
understanding as revealed in their actions with their explicit verbal understanding of
pretending in structurally analogous tasks. Throughout this paper, by an ‘implicit’
understanding of a domain we mean an understanding in action such that children can
competently respond to events and actions from that domain, that has something like a
proto-inferential structure and so goes beyond mere discrimination, but is not yet
‘explicit’ in the sense that children can competently talk and reason verbally about the
events in question. For example, in the area of social-cognitive development more
generally, children’s sophisticated and differential imitation of instrumental actions,
failed attempts and mistakes (e.g. Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello, 1998; Meltzoff, 1995)
would thus be considered as indicator of an implicit understanding of intentions in
2-year-olds, though children do not become proficient in talking and reasoning about
intentions until 4 or 5 years of age (e.g. Astington, 2001.) In the area of pretence, joint
pretence with others, such that children imitate and competently react to someone
else’s pretence action (e.g. pretending to pour into a cup) with another appropriate

pretence action (pretending to drink from that cup), would thus be an indicator of an
implicit understanding of pretence.1
Pretending is intentionally behaving as if one were carrying out an action, different
from only behaving as if performing an action unintentionally. Yet perhaps the most
influential theory of the development of young children’s pretence understanding, the
behaving-as-if theory (e.g. Harris, 1994; Jarrold, Carruthers, Smith, & Boucher, Lillard,
1994; Nichols & Stich, 2000; Perner, Baker, & Hutton, 1994) holds that young children
only have a superficial concept of pretending to perform an action X as behaving-as-if
Xing, and of pretending that p as behaving as if p were true, which is defined as
‘behaving in a way that would be appropriate if p (the counterfactual situation) were the
case’ (Nichols & Stich, 2000, p. 139). That is, according to this theory, young children’s
concept of pretence does not include the pretender’s intention as essential, and so is
much more coarse-grained than the mature one and has a much bigger extension than
the class of pretence actions. Accordingly, it does not allow for distinguishing
pretending from other kinds of as-if-behaviours (that do not produce outcomes), for
example, mistakes and trying. The behaving-as-if theory predicts then that young
children should make over-extension mistakes, such that they incorrectly apply their
concept of pretending to other forms of as-if behaviours.
In a recent set of studies, Rakoczy, Tomasello, and Striano (2004) tested the
behaving-as-if theory and showed that in more implicit and action-based tasks children
in their third year perceived pretending and trying very differently: they perceive
pretending to do an action as intentionally acting-as-if, in contrast to trying as behavingas-if accidentally only (where one really wants to perform the action properly but fails) –
in contrast to the claim of the behaving-as-if theory. In an imitation and turn-taking game,
children were presented with pairs of superficially similar as-if-behaviours, trying to do
an action, (e.g. to pour) and pretending to do the same action (e.g. to pour; importantly,
from a container that could be used to really pour, i.e. contained water). In both cases
the actor made the same pouring movements, but the action was not really done, no
water came out of the closed container. The trying models were marked with signs of
surprise and frustration as trying, the pretence models were marked with signs of
playfulness as pretending. Two- and 3-year-old children responded appropriately to the
two kinds of models: after trying models, they really performed the action or at least
tried to (making use of novel means and commenting on their failure). After pretence
models, in contrast, they only pretended to do the action themselves and went on to
perform appropriate inferential pretence responses (e.g. after the actor had pretended
to pour they pretended to drink).2 That is, the young children in these studies showed in
their actions and spontaneous language that they understood pretending as a specific
intentional action form, as intentionally acting-as-if only, radically different from trying to
do an action.
The first aim of the present work was thus to compare these findings with children’s
performance on a structurally analogous task with a more explicit verbal dependent
1

What we term ‘implicit’ here would thus comprise the levels I, E1 and E2 in Karmiloff-Smith’s(1992) taxonomy of levels of
understanding in cognitive development. For different ways of spelling out the implicit–explicit distinction for the description of
cognitive development more generally, see Bermudez (2003), Dienes and Perner (1999) and Karmiloff-Smith.
2
The 36-month-olds in this study showed this pattern very clearly. The 26-month-olds showed it very clearly after trying
models, whereas after pretence models, they often did make the mistake to really perform the action. However, they still
pretended vastly more often after pretence than after trying models, showing that they did differentially perceive the two
models.